10 comments:

That is a beautiful picture. You do have a collection of such lovelies, which I can admire along with your words.And Thomas yes, I am thinking, your words written very much akin to my own thinking.I am liking muchly, how each line kinda 'piggy-backs' on the other.'clouded by thawing tears' Just those few words do it for me.

The shrouds of Turin are everywhere. Eyes are preciousyou only have two of them.Ozone is a free radical.Anti-oxidants help some, but thereis a new organization forming, it'scalled "Poets against Entropy"They haven't got a chance but it'llbe an interesting fight.

I am wandering, it does very much look like a supernova's remnants to my untrained eyes. Michel Casse calls them our grand mothers because it is from the orange, yellow purplish dust that solar systems like ours are formed. The cataclysmic death of supernovas release more light in an instant than entire galaxies.

The Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the Helix Nebula by a team of astronomers and physicists from Vanderbilt is the subject of an article, "Unraveling the Helix Nebula : Its Structure and Knots" (Astronomical Journal 128.5).

From the Abstract of that article:

"Through Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of the inner part of the main ring of the Helix Nebula, together with CTIO 4 m images of the fainter outer parts, we have a view of unprecedented quality of the nearest bright planetary nebula. These images have allowed us to determine that the main ring of the nebula is composed of an inner disk of about 499" diameter (0.52 pc) surrounded by an outer ring (in reality a torus) of 742" diameter (0.77 pc) whose plane is highly inclined to the plane of the disk. This outer ring is surrounded by an outermost ring of 1500" (1.76 pc) diameter, which is flattened on the side colliding with the ambient interstellar medium. The inner disk has an extended distribution of low-density gas along its rotational axis of symmetry, and the disk is optically thick to ionizing radiation, as is the outer ring. Published radial velocities of the knots provide support for the two-component structure of the main ring of the nebula and for the idea that the knots found there are expanding along with the nebular material from which they recently originated. These velocities indicate a spatial expansion velocity of the inner disk of 40 and 32 km s-1 for the outer ring, which yields expansion ages of 6560 and 12,100 yr, respectively. The outermost ring may be partially ionized through scattered recombination continuum from the inner parts of the nebula, but shocks certainly are occurring in it. This outermost ring probably represents a third period of mass loss by the central star. There is one compact, outer object that is unexplained, showing shock structures indicating a different orientation of the gas flow from that of the nebula. There is a change in the morphology of the knots as a function of the distance from the local ionization front. This supports a scenario in which the knots are formed in or near the ionization front and are then sculpted by the stellar radiation from the central star as the ionization front advances beyond them."